I recently decided to force myself to actually learn FreeCad. I’ve tried on and off for the past two years but just couldn’t get along with the UI and workflow…well, now I’m giving it an honest shot, and after a few weeks of misery, it is getting better.

But my laptop is not particularly powerful, and I frequently have performance issues when working with imported step-files. Lo and behold, you can run FreeCad in docker, so I can use my server which is significantly more powerful and just access via browser.

The catch is, it seems to run even worse than on my laptop. I can also see that it actually doesn’t use much of the available power of the server. Does anyone have experience with setting up a docker compose for FreeCad? I’ve looked at the docs and my GPU should be passed through and I’ve also allocated 32GB ram to the container. But it doesn’t actually use it it seems.

  • ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
    2·
    9 hours ago

    Thats also not the most intensive part. Managing geometries and compute is the most intensive part and that is done server side.

      • ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
        1·
        8 hours ago

        Its really not that intensive, I barely break 15% CPU utilization and 25% RAM utilization on my laptop wheen using via browser to dockerized FreeCad on the server, compared to 100% CPU and 45% RAM when running FreeCad directly on the laptop.

        • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          11·
          5 hours ago

          I didn’t realize it was using a remote-desktop setup. Still 2-D rendering performance could be an issue in the browser depending on whether it’s using accelerated graphics or not.

          There are performance metrics other than CPU/memory usage. Like network latency, disk i/o, and bandwidth. UI performance on remote desktops tends to suffer from latency even with fast machines on local networks. The “proxmox console” for VMs I run in browser is a remote desktop and it performs… well enough for a server but I wouldn’t want to do anything significant in it. And that’s just presenting a desktop.

          You haven’t described the nature of your ‘poor performance’ well though. Is it display latency like I’m describing or things like loading projects or creating STL files that is slow?

          • ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
            1·
            5 hours ago

            It’s gigabit WiFi, latency to server is something like 5ms, and disk i/o and bandwidth barely even register above 1% on my laptop…the bottleneck is not network or the laptop.